“With its engaged ethnography, sensitive portrayals, and sharp critique, Flachs’s book can be considered the twenty-first century's transnational sequel to Walter Goldschmidt’s work that celebrated America’s small farms. Highlighting the limitations of industrial, capitalist agriculture, this book flags the potential that small farms in various parts of the world hold for ushering in new agrarian and social orders. If to ‘grow is to grow together’ in the spirit of community solidarity and cooperation, then this book enables us to question the tropes of productivity and unlimited growth.”—A.R. Vasavi, author of Shadow Space: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India
 
“Around the world, the most common livelihood that people have is small-scale farming, even though it is becoming increasingly marginalized by the corporations and states that shape people's lives. This wonderful new book, based on extensive work with small-scale farmers around the world, demonstrates that how the costs and benefits of small-scale farming are counted is a gross misrepresentation of its value. Small-scale farmers produce a greater diversity of life by building strong, meaningful relationships between people, plants, and landscapes. Rather than being the face of the past, this book shows that small-scale farming is critical to the face of a sustainable future. It will be essential reading for everyone who recognizes the peril facing our planet.”—A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, author of Hungry for Change: Farmers, Food Justice and the Agrarian Question

“This book is an exciting exploration of contemporary agriculture’s entangled webs of life, labor, and power. Flachs unveils how gardens and farms—whether in the Midwest, Bosnia, or Telangana—are not mere sites of production but vibrant places of creativity and resistance, where new configurations of human and nonhuman work point to a world beyond capitalism. This book is crucial for everyone seeking to understand how capitalism’s agrarian orders are remade and contested through everyday acts of resistance and reciprocity, offering a hopeful reimagining of agrarian life—and human possibility—in these turbulent times.”—Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital

“What might a degrowth approach to global agriculture look like? Flachs argues that farming must be unmoored from the logics of productivism that have led to stark inequalities in the global food system. Reimagining farming as reproduction, the book makes a forceful argument for a return to agriculture’s roots as a social relation, rather than an economic one.”—Sarah Besky, author of Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
 

“Andrew Flachs is a genius! This is the book we have needed for a long time to help us rethink our approach to food, agriculture, and human values on a societal level. Its insights are as significant for understandings of food and farming as The Omnivore’s Delima, and it is just as accessibly written. This book was a joy to read and gives me hope yet that we might come to think differently about food, the people and other beings who produce it, and what we really value!”—Terese Gagnon, editor of Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty

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